Posts tagged with DARWIN

In this year of Darwin celebrations (for the 200th anniversary of his birthday, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of “The Origin of Species”), I’d be remiss in my duty if I did not come up with a puzzle involving Darwin. He did, after all, come up with what the philosopher Daniel Dennett called “the single best idea anyone has ever had.” So here’s a puzzle, building on last week’s theme, that involves proving things impossible using odd and even numbers, and different types of colors. Think of it as a peg-jumping game, with a twist — in the tail!

Before we go on to our main problem, here’s a simple puzzle to get you started.

1. You have a large number of chameleon eggs of three different colors. Show that there is at least one pair of colors such that the average number of the eggs of those two colors is a whole number.

Why chameleon eggs? Well, let’s return to the story of Darwin. Darwin, as we all know, was intrigued by the flora and fauna of the Galápagos islands. Let us imagine that the spirit of Darwin returned to the Galápagos this year, and was saddened by the loss of biodiversity there. In particular, let us imagine Darwin was concerned at the fate of a very peculiar species of chameleon. The adults of this fascinating species are colored fully blue, green or red at any given time. However, as you can see in Justin Thyme’s beautiful illustration, when two differently colored chameleons meet face-to-face, as happens not infrequently, they both change to the third color. Read more…

Robert Wright’s new book, “The Evolution of God,” has a provocative title. But it’s a disappointment from the Darwinian perspective. He doesn’t mean real evolution, just the development of ideas about God.

He argues that our morality has improved over the centuries and that maybe the hand of the deity can be discerned in that progression, if one looks hard enough. But he leaves fuzzy the matter of whether he thinks a deity is there for real. There’s a moral order in history, he says, which “makes it reasonable to suspect that humankind in some sense has a ‘higher purpose.’” And maybe the source of that higher purpose, he writes, “is something that qualifies for the label ‘god’ in at least some sense of the word.”Read more…

If you like what the sounds of the above video, tomorrow you can hear the rest of this musical celebration of the life and writings of Charles Darwin. At 6 p.m. on Saturday, WCNY-FM will present radio and Web listeners with the complete performance of “The Origin,” an oratorio composed by Richard Einhorn, who drew from Darwin’s writings for the libretto. (The above video features an excerpt, “A Great Tree,” along with an accompanying film by Bill Morrison.)

Mr. Einhorn is the composer of “Voices of Light” (here’s the Wikipedia entry on it), which has performed over 150 times around the world (at halls ranging from Avery Fisher to the Sydney Opera House). He’s also a Grammy-award-winning producer (for a Yo Yo Ma album), a former rock drummer and a longstanding fan of science. Here’s how he describes his musical interpretation of Darwin: Read more…

The winner in the Non-Darwin Division is “I’m a Genius,” written in the voice of Albert Einstein, who provides a witty and tuneful proof of his intellectual superiority to every other human. It’s by Ray Jessel, a veteran of Broadway and cabaret, who imagines Einstein surveying his historical rivals:

Two cheers for Rembrandt and Immanuel Kant
But me, I’m a genius!
Alexander the Great
Next to me is third rate,
Just like Paganini is!
There’s Igor Stravinsky, Nijinsky and Minsky –
And Homer, of course, gets a nod.
There’s Newton and Nietzsche
And Pavlov was peachy,
But me — I’m a god!

The Darwin Division winner, “Mr. Darwin, Mr. Wallace, Mr. Matthew,” tells how a smart — but publicity-naïve — Scottish tree expert failed to get credit for publishing the theory of natural selection more than two decades before Darwin did. It’s by David Haines, a British songwriter, who directs a choir singing it in the video you can see later in this post.

There’s a fine assortment of articles on Darwin at Forbes.com, including one by Sean Carroll celebrating the stamina of the 19th-century naturalists who took such long journeys collecting specimens in some of the world’s most uncomfortable places. I’ve always wondered how Darwin endured on the Beagle while being horribly seasick day after day. I’ve been sick in lots of different ways on the road, and I’d rank seasickness second only to altitude sickness for sheer sustained misery.

Dr. Carroll, a professor of genetics at the University of Wisconsin, quotes a letter in which the seasick and homesick Darwin contemplates abandoning the voyage: “I know not, how I shall be able to endure it.” And that was written three years before the Beagle reached the Galapagos. Clearly, the man earned some birthday greetings.

Science has not been the most popular theme for songwriters, especially the ones who write for musical comedies. But now that Richard Milner has shown the way with his one-man Darwin show, the subject of my Findings column, perhaps we can start a trend of singing scientists. We’ll give a prize to the Lab reader who comes up with the best lyrics to be sung by Charles Darwin or any other scientist, alive or dead.

Video

Darwin's Nightmare

Richard Milner performs "Darwin's Nightmare," co-written with John Woram, a song inspired by Darwin's fear of the popular reaction to his theory of evolution.

The song can be any length and deal with any aspect of the scientist’s life or work. You can take some creative license, as Mr. Milner does in imagining the images in “Darwin’s Nightmare,” the song performed on the video here. But Mr. Milner’s song does have some historical basis — Darwin did fear a hostile reaction to his theory and did report having a nightmare — and we’ll be looking for a song based in real science and history. You’re responsible just for the lyrics, not the music, but you’re alsio welcome to write it to someone else’s tune. (Mr. Milner has borrowed from Gilbert & Sullivan.)

The prize is your choice of Mr. Milner’s forthcoming encyclopedia, “Darwin’s Universe: Evolution from A to Z,” or a CD of his one-man show, “Charles Darwin: Live and in Concert.” You can submit the song as a comment to this post.

About

John Tierney always wanted to be a scientist but went into journalism because its peer-review process was a great deal easier to sneak through. Now a columnist for the Science Times section, Tierney previously wrote columns for the Op-Ed page, the Metro section and the Times Magazine. Before that he covered science for magazines like Discover, Hippocrates and Science 86.

With your help, he's using TierneyLab to check out new research and rethink conventional wisdom about science and society. The Lab's work is guided by two founding principles:

Just because an idea appeals to a lot of people doesn't mean it's wrong.

But that's a good working theory.

Comments and suggestions are welcome, particularly from researchers with new findings. E-mail tierneylab@nytimes.com.